Oct 19, 2023

The "Scavengers/Scavengers Reign" team discusses the world-building process of the sci-fi thriller series - Exclusive

Max's adult animated series "Scavengers/Scavengers Reign" premiered its first three episodes on the platform today! We have an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the visual development process for the new show.

WARNING: The artwork below may contain mild spoilers.

This sci-fi thriller series follows the surviving crew of a damaged deep space freighter stranded on a beautiful but unforgiving planet. After discovering the planet's true nature, the small group must do everything they can to survive until they can escape or be rescued.

Scavengers Reign is co-produced and executive produced by Joe Bennett ("From the Mouth of God to Your Ears") and Charles Huttner ("Ghost Stories") and adapted from their excellent 2016 short "Scavengers" The film is an adaptation of their excellent 2016 short, "Scavengers. The duo served as executive producers on the series along with Green Street Pictures colleagues and co-producers Sean Buckeye and James Merrill. The Green Street team recently spoke with Cartoon Brew about the visual development process employed to create a diverse and believable alien planet and the narrative benefits of creating a symbiotic ecosystem.

According to Hüttner, "Each episode has its own story, but there is a larger narrative arch for the entire season. So we came up with an interesting way to put the characters where they needed to be, like putting puzzle pieces together."

That often meant creating unique landscapes and biomes, some of which were used only once. Time on screen was limited, but that did not mean that less thought was put into the designs.

"In this show, the characters travel very far and see an amazing variety of environments. So we worked hard to make sure the creatures and plants were rooted in the land," Hüttner explains. 'We needed to sense that and maintain the uniqueness of each place. In some episodes, some of the creatures never appear again.

"We also thought about the natural processes that would take place on the planet over thousands or tens of thousands of years, and what would happen if a person fell in the middle of them," Buckelieu explains. If, for example, there is a spore that infects ants, brainwashes them into climbing trees, and the birds eat them and spread the spores, that's a closed loop." But the 'Scavengers' version asks what happens if a person gets in the middle of the loop, what happens if that person is in an unstable psychological state."

According to Bennett, many of the series' strong influences were much less alien than one might imagine He says that "Charles and I produced the short stories. When Charles and I were working on the short, we delved into the concept of exploration because it was a purely visual story." We watched a lot of animal documentaries, and I think we got a lot of our influences from the nature of the planet." We realized that it's almost impossible to find something on Earth that doesn't already exist."

Nevertheless, the show's concept artists were given free rein in their designs. Almost all of the wildlife in the series appears to come from somewhere on Earth, but they have an otherworldly quality to them, which makes them constantly unsettling to watch, even in the most mundane scenes.

The first three episodes of Scavengers Reign are currently available on Max. Three episodes will be added each week, with all 12 episodes available on November 9.